The ninth volume of this edition, translation, and commentary of the Jerusalem Talmud contains two Tractates. The first Tractate, "Documents", treats divorce law and principles of agency when written documents are required. Collateral topics are the rules for documents of manumission, those for sealed documents whose contents may be hidden from witnesses, the rules by which the divorced wife can collect the moneys due her, the requirement that both divorcer and divorcee be of sound mind, and the rules of conditional divorce. The second Tractate, "Nazirites", describes the Nasirean vow and is the main rabbinic source about the impurity of the dead. As in all volumes of this edition, a (Sephardic rabbinic) vocalized text is presented, with parallel texts used as source of variant readings. A new translation is accompanied by an extensive commentary explaining the rabbinic background of all statements and noting Talmudic and related parallels. Attention is drawn to the extensive Babylonization of the Gittin text compared to genizah texts.

These papers address the central question of how classical Christian images of Jews have been acted out or muted in interreligious encounters in the USA. The book is organized according to the salient issues that divide Jews from the Christian majority, with sections on anti-Semitism.

This book discusses the origin and development of the Talmud.

Gellman presents a new theology of the Jews as the Chosen People, addressing self-serving ethnocentric supremacy, cultural isolation, and defamation of religions other than Judaism. This book is traditional in taking chosenness and the truth of Judaism seriously, and in eschewing a theology of multiple covenants. At the same time, it is critical, rejecting previous concepts of chosenness, and innovative, offering for the twenty-first century a fresh way of seeing the Jews' place in the world. On this foundation, Gellman suggests a new approach to inter-religious understanding from a Jewish point of view, and examines the impact of his proposal on traditional Jewish liturgy.

"Scribes and Translators is a critical reflection on the textual pluralism as reflected in the book of Kings.
The first part of the book examines the diverse texts transmitted by the manuscripts. Special attention is paid to the Antiochene text of the Septuagint that is being edited in Madrid. The second part is devoted to the analysis of Old Latin readings, transmitted by a Spanish family of Vulgate Bibles, with no support in any of the known manuscripts. Finally, the whole evidence is discussed in the frame of the plurality of texts confirmed by the Qumran documents for those books.
Based on Old Latin material recently published it sheds light on the text transmission of Kings and on the translation techniques and the history of the Biblical texts in general.

The present volume provides a comparative look at the contents and layout features of secondary annotations in biblical manuscripts across linguistic traditions. Due to the privileged focus on the text in the columns, these annotations and the practices that produced them have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. The vast richness of extant verbal and figurative notes accompanying the biblical texts in the intercolumns and margins of the manuscript pages have thus been largely overlooked. The case studies gathered in this volume explore Jewish and Christian biblical manuscripts through the lens of their annotations, addressing the various relationships between the primary layer of text and the secondary notes, and exploring the roles and functions of annotated manuscripts as cultural artifacts. By approaching biblical manuscripts as potential "notepads", the volume offers theoretical reflection and empirical analyses of the ways in which secondary notes may shed new light on the development and transmission of text traditions, the shifting engagement with biblical manuscripts over time, as well as the change of use and interpretation that may result from the addition of the notes themselves.

The question isn't whether grace is there for you in Judaism.The question is, do you have the courage to accept it?

"Chesed isn't a reward; it is reality. God s grace isn t limited to what we want to happen or might like to happen. God s grace is what is happening whether we like it or not. In short, God s grace is the giving of all to all." from the Introduction

Ask almost any Jew whether grace is a central concept in Judaism and an essential element in living Jewishly and, chances are, their answer will be no. But that s the wrong answer. This fascinating foray into God s love freely given offers you regardless of your level of Jewish involvement a way to answer that question in the affirmative.

Drawing from ancient and contemporary, traditional and non-traditional Jewish wisdom, this book reclaims the idea of grace in Judaism in three ways: It offers a view of God that helps you understand what grace is, why grace is, and how grace manifests in the world.It sets forth a reading of Judaism that is grace-filled: an understanding of creation, Shabbat and other Jewish practices from a grace-filled perspective.It challenges you to be embraced and transformed by grace, and to live life as a vehicle for God s grace, thereby fulfilling the promise of being created in God s image and likeness.

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Marc A. Krell analyzes the theologies of four twentieth-century Jewish thinkers - Hans Joachim Schoeps, Franz Rosenzweig, Richard Rubenstein, and Irving Greenberg - who have constructed theologies based on their interaction with Christian thought and culture. Their work reflects a common attempt to understand the impact of Christian culture on the historical events prior to and following the Holocaust, and to re-evaluate the relationship between the two religions in light of a history of theological anti-Judaism and modern, racial antisemitism. Krell argues that in their attempts to clarify Jewish identity in relation to Christianity, these thinkers reveal that the boundaries between the two faiths have always been blurred. The writing of these theologians illustrates a historical pattern in which Jewish theologies emerge out of a religious and cultural interchange with Christianity.

In The Comfort of Kin Monika Schreiber presents a study of the social and religious life of the Samaritans, a minority in modern Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Utilizing approaches ranging from anthropological theory and method to comparative history and religion, she approaches this community from diverse empirical and epistemic angles. Her account of the Samaritans, usually studied for their Bible and their role in ancient history, is enriched by a thorough treatment of the Samaritan family, a powerful institution rooted in notions of patrilineal descent and perpetuated in part by consanguineous marriage (which differs from incest in degree rather than in kind). Schreiber also discusses how the tiny community is affected by its demographic predicament, intermarriage, and identity issues.

Alfred Edersheim's well-researched account of everyday Jewish life at the time the New Testament Gospels took place remains one of the best texts on the subject ever authored. This edition includes the author's appendixes. The reader is taken back to Israel and the surrounding areas more than 2,000 years ago. How the society would appear to the casual traveler, what customs the people practiced, how everyday life proceeded in the Jewish homestead and towns, and how women were treated are topics which Edersheim examines. The author goes into much detail, presenting an evocative picture of a sophisticated ancient society. We also hear of the political landscape of the era, particularly concerning the Pharisees - the leading social and political movement of the time - and its interactions with rival movements such as the Sadducees and Essenes. Religious rites, the layout and ceremonies of ancient Jewish synagogues and temples, and the creation of the ancient religious Talmudic literature, are related.

This study examines by a meticulous analysis of abundant rabbinic citations the pluralism of the Halakhah in the pre-70 period which stands in contrast to the fixed Halakhah of later periods. The Temple's destruction provoked, for political motives, the initiation of this significant shift, which protracted itself, in developmental stages, for a longer period. The transition from the Tannaitic to the Amoraic era was a consequential turning point on the extended path from flexibility to rigidity in Jewish law.

The articles in this volume investigate changes in texts that became to be regarded as holy and unchangeable in Judaism and Christianity. The volume seeks to draw attention to the "empirical" evidence from Qumran, the Septuagint as well as from passages in the Hebrew Scriptures that have been shaped by the use of other texts. The contributions are divided into three main sections: The first section deals with methodological questions concerning textual changes. The second section consists of concrete examples from the Hebrew Bible, Qumran and Septuagint on how the texts were changed, corrected, edited and interpreted. The contributions of the third section will investigate the general influence and impact of Deuteronomistic ideology and phraseology on later texts.

In Polish Jews in Israel: Polish-Language Press, Culture, and Politics Elzbieta Kossewska presents a study of the political history of Polish Jews in Israel and their cultural and intellectual achievements, with particular emphasis on the Polish-language press. The book describes Polish immigrants' adaptation in Israeli society after World War II, and shows the shifting of emigrants' attitudes and viewpoints against the backdrop of the Israeli political system. The book contains numerous testimonies, memoirs, and personal documents from Polish journalists and writers that have never been published before. These anecdotes, biographical curiosities, and fascinating details create an evocative and colorful picture of the lives of key figures of post-war Polish life in Israel.

Targum Canticles, composed in the dialectally eclectic idiom of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic (LJLA), had immense historic popularity among Jewish communities worldwide. In this work, Paul R. Moore thoroughly analyses several of the Targum's grammatical peculiarities overlooked by previous studies. Through this prism, he considers its literary influences, composition, and LJLA as a precursor of the highly eccentric Aramaic of the 13th century Spanish cabalistic masterpiece, The Zohar. The study includes transcriptions and analysis of the previously unpublished of fragments of the Targum from the Cairo Geniza, and what is possibly its earliest, known translation into Judaeo-Arabic.

Christianson uses a variety of methods from art criticism to Todorov''s actantial model to sketch a compr ehensive picture of some hitherto neglected narrative elemen ts in Qoheleth''s text. '

Recent scholarship on ancient Judaism, finding only scattered references to messiahs in Hellenistic- and Roman-period texts, has generally concluded that the word ''messiah'' did not mean anything determinate in antiquity. Meanwhile, interpreters of Paul, faced with his several hundred uses of the Greek word for ''messiah, '' have concluded that christos in Paul does not bear its conventional sense. Against this curious consensus, Matthew V. Novenson argues in Christ among the Messiahs that all contemporary uses of such language, Paul's included, must be taken as evidence for its range of meaning. In other words, early Jewish messiah language is the kind of thing of which Paul's Christ language is an example.
Looking at the modern problem of Christ and Paul, Novenson shows how the scholarly discussion of christos in Paul has often been a cipher for other, more urgent interpretive disputes. He then traces the rise and fall of ''the messianic idea'' in Jewish studies and gives an alternative account of early Jewish messiah language: the convention worked because there existed both an accessible pool of linguistic resources and a community of competent language users. Whereas it is commonly objected that the normal rules for understanding christos do not apply in the case of Paul since he uses the word as a name rather than a title, Novenson shows that christos in Paul is neither a name nor a title but rather a Greek honorific, like Epiphanes or Augustus.
Focusing on several set phrases that have been taken as evidence that Paul either did or did not use christos in its conventional sense, Novenson concludes that the question cannot be settled at the level of formal grammar. Examining nine passages in which Paul comments on how he means the word christos, Novenson shows that they do all that we normally expect any text to do to count as a messiah text. Contrary to much recent research, he argues that Christ language in Paul is itself primary evidence for messiah language in ancient Judaism.

This book investigates the relationship between cult and ethics in the book of Isaiah. Part I attempts to revise some of the common Old Testament views on prophets and cult. After inspecting cultic concepts such as sacrifice, purity and impurity, holiness, and the Promised Land, it suggests that the priestly and prophetic understandings of the role of the Ancient Israelite cult were essentially the same. This general proposition is then tested on the book of Isaiah in Part II: each chapter there analyses the key passage on cult and ethics in the three main parts of the book, namely, Isa 1:10-17; 43:22-28; and 58:1-14 and concludes that, even though the role of cult and ethics in each part of the book varies significantly, the underlying principles behind the teaching about ritual and social justice in the various parts of the book of Isaiah are the same. Furthermore, these principles are cultic in nature, and in accord with priestly teaching. Far from being anti-ritualistic, the studied texts are concerned with what can be labelled The Ethical Dimension of Cult. The reason behind the variations of the role of cult and ethics in the book called Isaiah seems to be cultic as well, namely the purity or impurity of the people and the land before, during, and after the Babylonian exile.

The monograph considers the relationships of ethical systems in the ancient Near East through a study of warfare in Judah, Israel and Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. It argues that a common cosmological and ideological outlook generated similarities in ethical thinking. In all three societies, the mythological traditions surrounding creation reflect a strong connection between war, kingship and the establishment of order. Human kings' military activities are legitimated through their identification with this cosmic struggle against chaos, begun by the divine king at creation. Military violence is thereby cast not only as morally tolerable but as morally imperative. Deviations from this point of view reflect two phenomena: the preservation of variable social perspectives and the impact of historical changes on ethical thinking. The research begins the discussion of ancient Near Eastern ethics outside of Israel and Judah and fills a scholarly void by placing Israelite and Judahite ethics within this context, as well as contributing methodologically to future research in historical and comparative ethics.

Millions of American Christians see U.S. support for the State of Israel as a God-ordained responsibility. Millions more see the ''special relationship'' between the two countries as a bond that should never be challenged, much less broken. Robert O. Smith provides an in-depth look at the English Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation at the heart of this popular affinity. In 2006, John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel. Several high-level policymakers, both Christians and Jews, flocked to endorse the effort. Soon, however, questions rose about apparently anti-Catholic and anti-Islamic ideas contained in Hagee's preaching and writing. More Desired Than Our Owne Salvation explores the content of Christian Zionist attitudes, their resonance in popular American culture, and the history of the ideas that have contributed to present realities. After discussing polling data and exploring how Black Protestant views clarify general American attitudes, Smith revisits sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant interpretations of scripture and history. The Pope and the Turk figured significantly, identified by both Luther and Calvin as the two heads of the Antichrist. Protestant exiles from England carried these ideas back to Elizabethan England, provided a nationalist twist, and set Anglo-American history on a new path. The resulting English Protestant tradition of Judeo-centric prophecy interpretation shaped Puritan identity, which was then transferred to New England, where it began informing the foundations of American vocation and self-understanding. Through its developments and adaptations, this Judeo-centric tradition provided English colonists and Anglo Americans with purpose and vision. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, many Americans readily welcomed it as a prophetic counterpart, a country whose preservation ''may be more desired then our owne salvation.''